Jewish day schools are having a moment. 

Over the past few weeks, I encountered three pieces about Jewish education that approached the subject from very different directions but left me thinking about the same question:

What happens when a generation of Jews grows up without a deep understanding of Judaism and Jewish history?

Jonah Platt revisited an episode of his podcast, Being Jewish, about why some young, progressive Jews have become anti-Zionist. David Zalik wrote in eJewishPhilanthropy that Jewish day schools are a “bubble”, and argued that this is exactly the point. Mark Semer reflected on fifty years since his parents chose to send him to Jewish day school, and the extraordinary ripple effects that decision has had across generations of his family.

Each approaches the question differently. But reading and listening to all three, I kept returning to one thought:

We cannot afford a generation of Jewishly uneducated Jews.

I use those words intentionally. I do not mean that every Jewish child needs to become a Rabbi or a scholar, or that there is only one way to live an educated or meaningful Jewish life. Jewish education is not about producing one kind of Jew or prescribing one set of beliefs.

It is about giving our children the knowledge to understand the tradition they have inherited, and the ability to decide what they will do with it.

Our children deserve to know the story of which they are a part. They are not the beginning of the Jewish story. They are a moment in it, part of a people whose story stretches back thousands of years through sovereignty and exile, flourishing and persecution, destruction and rebuilding.

That story belongs to them. But they first need the opportunity to know it.

Why This Matters Now

Our young people are growing up amid extraordinarily complicated conversations about Israel, Zionism, Jew hatred, and Jewish identity. They encounter them among Jewish and non-Jewish friends in classrooms, on social media, and eventually on college campuses. They will be asked difficult questions. More importantly, they will have difficult questions of their own.

I do not believe the answer is to give our children better talking points. The answer is to give them a deeper Jewish education.

Before a young person can meaningfully engage in a conversation about Zionism, they need to understand what Zionism is in its many forms. Before they engage in conversations about Israel, they should understand the Jewish people’s millennia-long relationship with the Land of Israel, as well as the history and complexities of the modern state. Before they can wrestle with contemporary antisemitism, they should understand something about the history of antisemitism. Before they are asked what Judaism says about the world, they should have a deep knowledge of Judaism.

Teaching more than values

There is so much we rightly want our children to learn from Judaism. We want them to understand tikkun olam and our collective responsibility to repair the world. We want them to practice tzedakah, chesed, and derech eretz. We want them to celebrate Shabbat and the holidays, experience the warmth of Jewish community and ultimately find a Jewish community that most speaks to them while also exposing them to the pluralism of our tradition.

All of that matters enormously. But Jewish education must also give our children something more: the knowledge and context from which those values emerged.

A child should learn the stories of the Tanakh. A child should learn what happened to the Jewish people after the destruction of the Temples, and about Jewish life in Spain and the expulsion of 1492. A child should learn about the centuries of Jewish life across Europe, and about the Jews of Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, and other parts of the Arab world. A child should learn about the Shoah. A child should understand Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, while also understanding that Jewish history did not begin in Israel in 1948.

A child should learn how Jews pray, even as they develop their own relationship with prayer. They should encounter Jewish texts and wrestle with Jewish questions. They should learn modern Hebrew, a language that connects Jewish people across geography and generations. 

Jewish history should not feel simply like a collection of things that happened long ago to other people. It is their history.

The Purpose of the “Bubble”

I was struck by Zalik’s description of Jewish day schools as a “bubble” and I understand why parents might hesitate at that idea. Of course we want our children to know the world, to encounter people who are different from them, to experience diversity and disagreement. 

But there is a difference between protecting a child from the world and preparing a child to enter it. The purpose of a Jewish day school is not to keep a child in a bubble forever. It is to give a child the knowledge, identity, relationships, and confidence to leave that bubble and engage the world fully.

Every child grows up in some kind of bubble. The question is not whether our children will be shaped by their environment. We know they will be. The question is whether we will intentionally give them the foundation from which they can encounter the world and decide who they are.

What I See Every Day at Hillel Day School

I think about this every day when I walk through the halls of Hillel Day School of Metropolitan Detroit. Our students are learning math, science, language arts, history, art, and technology. They are developing the academic skills, habits of mind, and independence they will need for high school and beyond.

At the same time, something else is happening. They are learning who they are. 

They are learning Hebrew and Jewish history, reading Jewish texts, and learning to pray. They are studying our connection to Israel and understanding the rituals of Jewish holidays. They are learning that Judaism has never been afraid of a good question or a serious disagreement. And they are doing all of this surrounded by other Jewish children and caring adults who know them, challenge them, and help them understand that they are part of something much larger than themselves.

There is power in a child spending part of their life in a place where they never have to explain why they are Jewish. 

But the goal is not that they will never have to explain it. The goal is that, when the time comes, they can.

There is power in hearing Hebrew every day, and studying Jewish history not as an occasional unit, but as the story of one’s own people. There is power in growing up understanding that being Jewish is not merely something your parents happen to be. It is something you can value, question, wrestle with, and ultimately choose to carry forward.

The Inheritance We Give Our Children

We do not know what the Jewish world will look like when today’s kindergarteners are twenty five. We do not know what questions they will face or what the next chapter of Jewish history will bring. 

But we can decide what they will carry with them when they get there.

We can give them knowledge, history, Jewish literacy, relationships, and community. We can give them the confidence that comes from knowing not only that they are Jewish, but what that has meant across thousands of years, and what it might mean in their own lives.